Are you a beginner in blogging world or want to start your own blog, but you don’t have a clear idea of the many simple yet complex blogging term like SEO, Social Bookmarking, backlinks, affiliate marketing etc.

Congratulations, you have just come to the right place. In this article of 40+ Blogging Terms Every Blogger Should Know – Beginners Guide I will explain the most useful blogging terms in a simple way. Remember, as a digital marketer you will be more confident, once you go through this blog post.

So without further ado, let’s get straight to the article.

Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is basically a new approach to reach the consumer with the use of the internet, mobile devices, social media, search engines, online advertisement, email marketing and by other channels.

Digital marketing is totally a new way to approach customers than the traditional marketing. It involves a two-way interaction between the marketer and the company.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is similar to traditional marketing, where the marketer refers a person (buyer) to any online product (merchant site) when a person buys the product with the recommendation of the marketer, the marketer get a commission on every sales/ lead generated.

Let’s learn it from an example-

If a company X is selling a product i.e. software and you become their affiliate marketer. You will promote their product on your site/blog. Now when any of your readers buy that product based on your recommendation, you will get the affiliate commission for every sales/lead generated.

SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is nothing but a process of optimizing your website or webpage to get better ranking in Google SERP’s.

We do SEO of a website to increase organic traffic from the search engine as well.

On Page SEO

On page SEO is what we do on your website to get higher ranking an good amount of organic traffic from the search engines. It basically includes-

Optimizing blog post.

Title and meta tags.

Keyword density.

Image optimization.

Url optimization.

Off Page SEO

OFF page SEO refers to all the steps and measure we do from outside of our website in order to improve our ranking in search engine. It includes-

Link Building.

Social media marketing.

Content marketing.

Web 2.0 creation.

Directory submission.

White Hat SEO

When we do SEO of a website by following the search engine guidelines to improve the SERP, that is known as White Hat SEO.

Example of white hat SEO-

Guest Posting.

Email Outreaching.

Blog Commenting.

Black Hat SEO

When SEO is done by an unethical way, that does not come under the guidelines of Google, is known as Black Hat SEO.

Some of Black Hat SEO techniques are-

PBN (Private Blog Network)

Keyword Stuffing.

Cloaking.

Backlink

Backlinks are the incoming links from another website to your website. Backlinks play an important role in SEO. If your website has a backlink from a high authority website, then your website will be considered authority website and Google will give more importance to your site.

Do Follow Link

Do follow link tells the search engine to follow the links and pass all the link juice to the external links. Do follow links gives a signal to the Google to trust the link and Google gives importance to these Do follow links.

No Follow Link

As the name suggests No Follow links tell the search engine to not follow the link. No follow link is not much beneficial as compared to DO follow links but getting a No Follow link from high authoritative sites like Wikipedia also pass some amount of authority, hence it’s also valuable.

Anchor Text

Anchor text is the text that is visible and clickable in any hyperlink. In another word anchor text is the text used for giving the backlink to someplace on the web.

Here this page is the anchor text for the hyperlink (http://www.bloggersdose.com/).

Crawler

Crawlers are search engine bots that crawl and index web pages from all over the web and store the web page URLs to their search engine database. Example of some popular search engine crawlers are-

Google Bot.

MSN Bot.

Yahoo Slurp.

Broken Link

A link referring to a webpage which exists earlier but does not exist now is known as a broken link. Google do not love broken link & readers also do not find it cool when they follow a link and get the error “Webpage Does Not Exist”. So, remove the broken link from your site ASAP.

301 Redirect

301 redirect is a permanent redirect of a URL to another one (new URL). 301 redirect basically direct the search engine to send the users (visitors) to a different URL that the one the originally requested from the search engine result page.

Robot.txt

Robot.txt is a text file created by website/blog owner to instruct the search engine bots about the indexing and visiting of a webpage of your site. This text file is submitted by a website owner to Google search engine console.

Disavow.txt

If you want to get rid of all the spammy link pointing to your website, Then you need to create a disavow.txt file containing all the spammy link in it and submit it to your Google search console account.

Meta Tags

A meta tag is a little content description that helps the search engine to identify what a web page is all about. So basically it is used to provide information about your webpage to the search engine.

Meta tags are used within the head tags of any web pages.

Google Algorithm Updates

The formula Google uses to evaluate websites to give relevant search result to the visitor can be considered as Google Algorithm Updates. It helps Google to fight spamming and content plagiarism. So Google often releases these algorithms.

Panda Updates

It was the first Google algorithm update released in 2011. It was released by Google to fight from-

Duplicate and thin content.

User-generated spam.

Keyword stuffing.

Content Plagiarism.

Panda rollout was one of the most impactful algorithm updates from Google.

Penguin Updates

It is the second algorithm launched by Google in April 2012. The main motive of this update was to penalize the sites that are spamming the search engine with-

Spammy and irrelevant link.

Over-optimized anchor text.

Manual link spamming.

Google Penguin update was mainly focused to fight link spamming on the web.

Hummingbird Updates

With Google Hummingbird update Google can better interpret search queries and provide a result that matches the searcher’s intent. With Hummingbird update, it is possible for a page to rank for a query even if it does not contain exact words that the searcher enter in their web browser.

It is basically to understand the context of the user’s search queries.

DA and PA

DA stands for Domain Authority while PA stands for Page Authority. These two are the metrics used to predict the strength of a website and are created by MOZ.

Having high DA & PA of your website means it has the higher chance of ranking in Google.

XML Sitemap

XML sitemap is like a roadmap to search engine. It is the collection of all the necessary pages of your website that are needed to be index by a search engine. So it helps the search engine to find and crawl the important webpage from your blog.

Bounce Rate

When visitors to any site bounce back immediately after visiting a site can be considered as a bounce rate. Higher bounce rates are signal that the visitors are not satisfied with your site. It is not at all good for your website and you can lose your SERP’s ranking.

Bounce rate between 50-60% is okay but anything more than that is not considered good.

SERPs

SERPs stands for search engine page result. In response to a searcher’s query, Google shows some results that can be considered as SERP’s. A SERP page contains 10 results excluding ads and Google answer boxes.

Google Search Console

Google search console is a free service offered by Google to analyze and learn in-depth information about your website/blog. By using Google search console you can maintain your site presence in SERP.

Also by using GSE you can easily index/crawl your webpage or content in Google search result.

Google Analytics

Google analytics is a free analytical too by Google to analyze the website traffic and visitor behavior. By using Google analytics too you can find out the things like how many of people visiting your site and how they finding it. Whether they are visiting your site from a mobile device or desktop computer.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is a technique used for OFF page SEO for a website. It is similar to the bookmark you keep in a web browser but as it is submitted to social to social bookmarking sites publically on the web so anyone can read it anywhere.

Some of the social bookmarking sites are-

Evernote

Pinterest

Bitly

StumbleUpon

Scoop.it

Directory Submission

The process of submitting your website link to high PR web directories can be considered as directory submission, where a directory is the collection of high PR link on the web.

Additional directory submission helps to bring high-quality backlink for your site which increases ranking and authority of a website.

AMP

AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. It is the project of Google which aim to deliver super rich user-friendly content on the web by slashing down heavy HTML and JavaScript code.

AMP is beneficial for any website as-

It speeds up website load time.

It increases mobile ranking.

Improves overall ranking and server performance.

Keyword

Keywords are basically the ideas or words that are used by searchers in any search engine. In another word, keywords are the search queries for the searcher that he enter in a web browser. For bloggers, it is the main topic of content creation that meets the need of searchers query.

Head Tail Keyword

Head-tail keywords are also called as short tail keywords which contain a word only.

For example– software, cricket etc.

These keywords are not much useful as it is not specific at all. Also, it is difficult to rank in the search engine.

Medium Tail Keyword

These are medium size keyword, which is very specific are very specific and accompanied by a large search volume.

For example– Weight Loss Tips

Long Tail Keyword

Long tail keywords are super specific but are low in search volume. Also, these keywords are easy to rank in the search engine as compared to the above two.

For example – Weight Loss Tips for Men

These keywords are less competitive and mostly transactional.

Keyword Difficulty

In keyword research, we determine whether the keyword is easy or difficult to rank based on that we calculate the keyword difficulty score for any keyword. The higher the score, the harder is to rank the keyword in search engines. So basically it is the metrics to analyze the keyword competition.

SEO Audit

SEO audit is a process of analyzing the overall performance of a website to improve site visibility in search engine. In the SEO audit, we try to identify the flaws in SEO and correct it to rank higher and to get organic traffic from search engine.

Guest Posting

Writing an article for someone website and getting a link back to your site can be considered as a guest posting. It helps to-

Build a relationship with the digital marketer.

Get exposure in the blogging world.

Improving the authority of your blog.

Getting a high authority backlink.

Guest posting is also known as Guest Blogging.

Contextual Links

A contextual link is a type of link that is usually found in the body of an article/content. I can be natural as well as manually made doing by guest posting to someone’s website.

SSL Certificate

The information we send on the internet is passed from computer to computer to get to the destination server. Any computer between you and the server can see your sensitive data username, password, credit card no. etc. To prevent this we need an SSL certificate and by using this, the information becomes unreadable to everyone except for the server we are sending.

SSL certificate is also called the digital certificate and it protects us from hackers.

So that’s it, for now guys If you find this article 40+ Blogging Terms a Blogger Should Know – Beginners Guide helpful for you, I would appreciate if you could hit share to help more beginners to know these blogging terms in a simple way and if you have any problem in question regarding these terms do let me know in the comment section below.